


Forever Reaching for the Gold

by bedfordfalls



Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Angst, Breakups, M/M, Past Relationships, idk what im doing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-23
Updated: 2015-12-23
Packaged: 2018-05-08 14:22:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5500562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bedfordfalls/pseuds/bedfordfalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Nobody had been certain what was happening, not Ryan, not Spencer and Jon, and sure as hell not Brendon himself.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forever Reaching for the Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Title ripped from a song as usual, this time it's from Desire Lines

It was great when it was just fucking—best friends turning to god-knows-what, fueled by liquor and fluorescent lights. Nothing but post-show sweat and skin on skin. No kisses, no conditioner words, just gasping breaths in still hotels. 

But it couldn't last, of course. Of course.   
Brendon had seen it coming since the beginning, known how this would end since the first adrenaline-drunk slide of Ryan's hands under the waist of his too-tight leather pants, since the first time he heard his own name rough on Ryan's tongue. It drummed in his head, louder with every week, every month.  _You'll fuck it up you'll fuck it up you'll fuck it up you'll fuck it up._

And he did. 

Nobody had been certain what was happening, not Ryan, not Spencer and Jon, and sure as hell not Brendon himself. All anyone knew was that Brendon and Ryan were becoming volatile, infamously so. One minute they were clinging to each other in corners, oblivious to the world around them, and the next minute they were screaming, shoving away, whole rooms falling quiet as they yelled. 

It was his fault, Brendon knew, whatever was developing. He had pushed away from Ryan in the past months, forcefully, intentionally. An act of kindness, of mercy. A grasp at keeping Ryan away from what had developed, saving him from the gratuitous abrasion of his reality—that for Brendon, it had become more than fucking. 

It had become something emotional, and oh God, Brendon knew how that would end—something along the lines of kisses in the dark and lifelong promises and the sound of his father's disgust ringing in his ears, another reckless teenage memory he couldn't seem to escape. 

 _"I can't do this, Bren. Not anymore."_ A bruise had been blooming across the boy's cheekbone. It wasn't a breakup, it was a goodbye. 

Brendon hadn't said a word when Jon called him, voice soft as he delivered the news, bit back words of empty comfort. 

_"It's not your fault."_

Something grotesque had risen in Brendon's throat that day, and hadn't left since. 

  


*

  


So he forced Ryan away—what else was he supposed to do? Sex was fine. It was detached, animalistic, engrained. But when he closed his eyes, the images of him kissing Ryan burned against his lids, a momentary vision of them together, as something other than best friends who (more than) occasionally fucked. It was romance, and romance was something Brendon couldn't do. Not with Ryan.

Romance was the pipeline through which Brendon's toxicity could flow. He just couldn't risk it.

And the more he shoved away from Ryan, the more he could feel Ryan's anger, his hatred, and God, Brendon reveled in it. Anger was easy. It simmered under the skin, and later, whenever Brendon found the courage to leave the band that had become his whole life, anger would mean that Ryan could move on. Maybe he'd have a flicker of nostalgia once in a while for his former best friend, but it would pass and he would keep fucking going. He'd find someone else to fuck him in 4 am motels, someone else to go down on their knees backstage until he came with a crowd chanting his name. He'd find someone else who wasn't toxic. Who wasn't destructive. Who wasn't Brendon. 

Brendon couldn't tell if the thought comforted him or ate him alive. 

  


*

  


The first time Ryan got mad—really mad—Brendon almost grinned. Ryan was yelling, his voice shaking, a barely contained spread of rage after one too many asshole comments. 

" _What the fuck is your problem?_ " His face had been flushed, made somehow more beautiful as blood rose to his cheeks. Brendon's comments had been low blows, low enough that they were painful to say, but Ryan's anger was visceral, curling, writhing proof that this was working. Ryan was starting to hate him, and resentment was the easiest antidote for friendship. 

  


*

  


And Brendon? Brendon coped as he always had. A couple of bags of weed, the persistent taste of vodka and bile, the smell of blood he didn't remember (but the stains on the bathroom tiles were memory enough). Every time he felt the regret and remorse like knives through his skin, he forced them out of his glittering mind with anything on hand. It surprised him to look in the mirror and see anything other than a blurred figure, faceless and overflowing with Jack Daniels, with cigarettes, with marijuana and razors and orange tinted plastic bottles. 

Still, it was easy enough this way. Or at least he told himself it was. 

They were still having sex, but it wasn't the same. It was no longer a celebration, a laugh in the face of the god that Brendon couldn't bring himself to believe in. It was mortal and real and nothing like their dreamlike past. It was biting and blood and screamed insults, a schoolyard fight that just happened to end with comestained sheets. 

And then it wasn't even that. They stopped having sex, even after fights, because really, they didn't fight anymore. Instead of spitting curses and blood, they barely spoke, save for tight-lipped smiles on air and glances shot uncomfortably from across the bus. Brendon could barely stand to look at Ryan most of the time. He looked different—no longer the eager boy Brendon used to see come alive onstage, glowing with almost alien beauty. He had changed. Still beautiful, but harder, more worn. Dark rings circled his eyes, and when he and Spencer stood outside the bus with cigarettes clenched between their fingers, the tremor in Ryan's voice brought Brendon nearly to tears. 

Brendon, who used to live for concerts, endlessly high on the rush of the crowd, was starting to hate the feeling of the stage beneath his feet. Every song they played felt like a memory, breaking him further with each line. 

  


*

  


He didn't remember what day Spencer pulled him aside, looking him dead in the eye as he spoke. 

" _If this doesn't stop, I don't know what'll happen, but I won't be able to stop it._ "

" _Bullshit._ " Brendon had tossed back. Spencer Smith was a god. He was the intermediate amongst them all, able to fix anything in the band. But he couldn't fix this, couldn't fix Brendon. And he definitely couldn't fix the friendship that Brendon had shattered. 

  


*

  


Although he had known before then, Brendon considered the 6th to be the day he died. He had assumed he would be angry to see Ryan's words in stark type, but he wasn't. It didn't feel like a gunshot or a knife to the stomach or like anything at all. It felt numb, numb enough that Brendon, in all his hatred for the doctrine he had rejected so early in his life, found himself a step away from begging God for a reason why any of this was happening, the entirety of the events building into a crescendo of tears and a voice that couldn't possibly be his echoing screams into the air. He demanded an answer from everyone and everything he had once revered (God, Christ, and Ryan Ross), begged to know why he was who he was. Why he was parasitic and toxic and why he drowned everyone he loved in his sea of misplaced attachment and fabricated ego. 

The sound echoed from the bottom of his throat just as it did all those years ago. Just as it always had. 

  


*

  


Ryan wrote to him once, twice, three times, pointless formalities in narrow, familiar writing. 

 _How have you been?_  
_How are you doing?_  
_Congrats on the album._  

The tinge of emotion was still in every letter, in looping script and the shaky lines on Brendon's name and the way Ryan ended each letter with a few lines scratched out, as if he changed his mind about whatever he had written. 

Brendon couldn't respond, wouldn't respond, but he could never bring himself to throw the letters away. He folded them up, shoved them into the back of his desk and the back of his mind. He didn't need Ryan, he told himself, he was Brendon fucking Urie. He owned everything he did and everything he was. Ryan was an ex bandmate. Nothing more. 

_Nothing more._

  


Ryan stopped writing. 

  


Brendon burned the letters he had saved. 

Ryan could have written a fucking masterpiece about this, about the flames swallowing the curled pages, the lingering aftertaste of something they never really had. 

When Brendon wrote it, it didn't sound the same. 


End file.
